How to Muff a Mobile Marketing Campaign, Part 2

"Mobile CRM installations are destined to fail if companies don't heed the lessons learned from traditional CRM deployments of more than a decade ago," warned QuestBack's Darren Bosik. "Back then, businesses relied too much on the technology ... and did little to change their business processes around customer feedback."

You wouldn't think it was easy to bungle a mobile marketing campaign -- but it definitely is doable.

Six in 10 decision makers planned to increase their companies' mobile marketing budgets in 2013, Forrester said earlier this year, reporting on a survey conducted for Acquent. However, 42 percent of those respondents were worried about achieving ROI.

They have good reason to be, if CRM Buyer's informal survey of marketing experts is any indication. Mobile marketing may be a hot growth area, but it is still a hit-or-miss affair. Part 1 of this two-part series explains how some of those "misses" happen. Here are some more ways to muff a mobile marketing campaign.

1. View a Campaign Only as a Selling Tool

"Mobile CRM has a great opportunity to build loyalty and value by being contextual to the customer's experiences and perception of the brand," Syed Hasan, CEO of
ResponseTek, told CRM Buyer. "The danger is that the CMO only sees mobile as a new channel for traditional campaigns, and misses the opportunity to gain information that will allow him to better target advertising and offers to increase conversion rates."

It is the same pitfall that befell traditional CRM, he noted -- that is, emphasizing opportunities to sell based on customer knowledge alone without leveraging individual customer experiences.

"Mobile CRM" may be flawed term, Hasan suggested, because it implies an effort that is about sales and nothing but sales.

"We believe the conversations should start with experience and end with sales," he said.

2. Don't Seek Customer Feedback

The CRM projects that failed miserably yesterday offer a lesson for today's mobile campaigns, said Darren Bosik, senior methodologist at
QuestBack. The message: Get feedback from customers and incorporate that feedback into the next campaign!

"Mobile CRM installations are destined to fail if companies don't heed the lessons learned from traditional CRM deployments of more than a decade ago," Bosik warned.

"Back then, businesses relied too much on the technology for gathering customer data into a centralized repository and did little to change their business processes around customer feedback," he told CRM Buyer.

"Mobile CRM solutions carry similar responsibilities -- it is the company's responsibility to engage customers with feedback processes -- such as mobile surveys and ordering -- that improve the customer experience without sacrificing privacy or security," Bosik maintained.

3. Pick the Wrong Supporting System

Mobile campaigns start with a solid mobile marketing and CRM system. It doesn't matter how savvy the campaign is, if the supporting system is unwieldy or doesn't integrate well.

Companies should seek out mobile packages with this goal in mind, Bosik said.

The mobile CRM solution should improve the quality and timeliness of entering customer feedback data. It should accelerate the sales or service conversion time, and it should also ease integration with legacy systems such as survey and salesforce technology platforms, transactional databases, and even social media monitoring tools.

"The more the business can optimize mobile CRM solutions to integrate with other customer data, the better it can service customers individually and improve customer satisfaction," said Bosik.

4. Ignore the Real-Time Element

Mobile CRM needs to be as real-time as possible so it can match the behaviors people express on mobile devices and deliver the kind of value expected from mobile users, said
RAPP VP Craig Elimeliah, director of creative technology.

"Mobile CRM needs to be as good at listening and responding as it is in collecting as much data as possible so that tailored communications and experiences can be delivered in real time," he told CRM Buyer.

"Mobile is fast," Elimeliah said, "so big data marts and CRM algorithms needs to react much quicker based on context and needs of the mobile customer."

Erika Morphy has been writing about technology, finance and business issues for more than 20 years. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.